The Quad-City Times - News, Sports and more from the Quad Cities region or Iowa and Illinois

You are not logged in.
Login

Log in to qctimes.com
Email:
Password:
Remember my information.
Register
Site Help

Note to users: Technical difficulties are causing some comments to not appear. We appreciate your patience as we work on it.

Sheriff: Grant is needed to keep tabs on offenders

Font Size:

Default font size

Larger font size

By Kurt Allemeier | Sunday, May 11, 2008 11:00 PM CDT | () comments

Fielding the phone calls, taking the mugshots and filling out the paperwork for sex offenders registered in Scott County could be a full-time job.

The Scott County Sheriff’s Department, given the assignment to track sex offenders in Scott County, has one deputy assigned to investigations who handles the task on a part-time basis. Sheriff Dennis Conard wants someone for the job full time.

Increased sex offender registration requirements that will go into effect next year will create enough additional work that Conard wants to create a full-time position through a federal grant for the assignment. He has submitted a federal grant for $72,964 to fund the position.

“If they put these requirements on us, and there are a large number of sex offenders in Scott County, we felt it is necessary to do what we have to do,” Conard said. “There are only a handful of counties in Iowa that are going to have a big impact because of the number of sex offenders who reside there.”

Scott County has 283 registered sex offenders. Johnson County, where the Iowa Medical and Classification Center is located, has 625, and Polk County has 419.

Under the Adam Walsh Act, sex offenders are grouped by the severity of their offense. Low-level offenders register once a year, while higher-level offenders have to register two or four times per year.

Deputy Robert Jackson handles sex offender registration compliance. He takes phone calls from concerned residents, sends out letters to day care centers and knocks on doors to confirm a sex offender’s address. If a sex offender doesn’t live where he or she says, follow-up work has to be done.

“It is very time-consuming,” Jackson said. “You could spend eight hours a day, five days a week doing this, especially with the changes coming in with the Adam Walsh Act.”

Other deputies are trained to register sex offenders, and officers from Davenport and Bettendorf also help with the process.

Of Scott County’s 283 registered sex offenders, 230 live in Davenport. About a quarter of those are the highest-level offenders. Conard figures his department faces almost 700 visits annually under the new law.

The Adam Walsh Act includes grant funding to help allay additional costs of the added enforcement. That is good news for Conard, but he knows that federal funding for the deputy eventually will end.

“We would approach the board when it comes about,” the sheriff said of the dried-up grant funding.

While Iowa requires a sheriff’s department to enforce sex offender registration for an entire county, Illinois requires all jurisdictions to enforce the sex offender law in their respective area. The Rock Island County Sheriff’s Department tracks about 40 offenders who live in the county’s unincorporated areas. Rock Island County has 292 sex offenders in all. Rock Island County Sheriff Mike Huff said about one-fourth of the 40 offenders tracked by his department are the highest-level offenders who would have to register four times a year.

“They would present no difficulty for us to keep up with more required reporting,” Huff said. “We have several employees who are qualified to do it and who do do it.

“We would do everything possible even if it is burdensome to do this because it protects the children of Rock Island County.”

Kurt Allemeier can be contacted at (563) 383-2360 or kallemeier@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.